Administering a plurality of heterogeneous applications or systems in a networked environment is a challenging task that consumes a large amount of organizational resources. However, organizations continue to require the existence and use of heterogeneous applications for a variety of reasons, such as requirements of existing clients, legacy applications, functionality required by the organization, and the like. Therefore, organizations are forced to develop ad hoc techniques to assist in better and more efficient management of heterogeneous applications. In addition, many times organizations desire interoperability between the heterogeneous applications in order to more fully integrate the applications with one another for productivity improvements
Generally, organizations that manage heterogeneous applications will develop expertise with one employee for a particular application and expertise with a different employee for another application. This creates duplicate personnel to manage applications, which is necessary because the applications have different data characteristics (e.g., policies, validation techniques, data types, data values, data ranges, data lengths, and the like). These different data characteristics may require that multiple policies be established to accommodate the varying data characteristics for the heterogeneous applications being supported by the organization.
For example, one application may require a password having a minimum data length of 6 characters, while another application may require a password having a minimum data length of 8 characters. This situation requires the organization to be able to administer two different password policies with respect to these applications. In some instances, the disparate policies can be more complex and thus require multiple network administrators.
Moreover, the disparate data characteristics can inhibit the interoperability of two heterogeneous applications, since if the two applications are communicating with one another the data characteristics of a first application may not conform to or be properly translated by a second application. Thus, to effectively interface the two applications, the second application needs to handle the data characteristics of the first application.
Conventional techniques to alleviate these problems have focused on creating mapping algorithms, which generally translate data between two heterogeneous applications but do not alter or normalize the data characteristics handled by two heterogeneous applications. While these techniques may be useful for importing and exporting disparate data, they do not permit two applications to effectively communicate with one another, and they do not create single policies that can be used to administer both heterogeneous applications. In fact, these techniques create yet another policy to administer, which is the new mapping algorithm, in addition to the two heterogeneous applications. Further, despite the importing of disparate data, the requirements of the application requiring a longer password from a system utilizing only smaller passwords can only be accomplished by either subverting the policy of the first system or mangling the data from the second system to create the mapping in a deterministic manner.
As is now apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art, there exists a need for improved techniques that can normalize data characteristics for heterogeneous applications. This need is particularly desirable for large networks having a plurality of heterogeneous applications and policies. Furthermore, the techniques should be capable of federating the normalized data characteristics across heterogeneous applications, such that a single network policy can be implemented, maintained, and supported for the heterogeneous applications.